Dead Man Walking (2007 return engagement)

2007 season · Production archive

Named Best Production Based On Principle by Westword’s Best of Denver 2006, this critically acclaimed production returned to The Vic for a longer run in the spring of 2007. Dead Man Walking is the autobiographical story of Sister Helen Prejean’s experience as spiritual adviser to Matt Poncelet, a convicted murderer on death row.

Written by

Tim Robbins

Directed by

Angela Stringer Astle

Ran

April 20 – June 7, 2007

About the production

The 2006 staging had run for eleven days. The return engagement ran for seven weeks — a rare thing for a play of this weight in a house this size, and a sign of how far word of the first production had travelled. The Vic’s ordinary pattern was a six-to-eight-week run of Friday and Saturday evenings with a Sunday matinee, so the 2007 dates put Dead Man Walking on the same footing as the comedies that paid the bills.

The play is written for an educational setting and was licensed to the Vic on that basis. Its subject matter also brought the theatre an audience it would not otherwise have had: among the sites that linked to the playhouse in this period were Colorado death-penalty-abolition groups pointing supporters at the production. A separate page in this archive collects what survives of both runs.

Where it sat in the season

It was production 3 of 8 in the Vic’s 2007 season. It followed No Sex Please, We’re British (Mar 2 – Apr 7, 2007) and was followed by My Husband’s Wild Desires Almost Drove Me Mad (Jun 15 – Jul 21, 2007). The full year is set out on the season calendars page, and every production the theatre staged between 2005 and 2011 is indexed in the production archive.

The house’s standard pattern was Friday and Saturday evenings at 7.30 with a Sunday matinee, over a run of six to eight weeks. With seventy-five seats, a full eight-week run put roughly 1,800 people through the room — which a 500-seat theatre does in four nights, and which is the single fact that explains most of what the Vic chose to programme.

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This page is part of the production archive of the Denver Victorian Playhouse, a seventy-five-seat theatre in the basement of a northwest Denver house that staged its last performance in 2011. Details here are restored from the theatre’s own records as they were published at the time; press quotations are reproduced with their original attributions and nothing has been added to them.